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One of the things keep­ing me busy at the moment (notice the appalling lack of posts) is cre­at­ing a writ­ing guide for one of our clients. The idea is to pro­duce a guide that is one part tone of voice guid­ance, one part style guide and one part stuff-they-didn’t-teach-you-at-school-but-will-really-help.

So it’s within this con­text that this arti­cle in the Observer caught my eye. Essen­tially, it reports on a drive to appoint gram­mar police to assess whether the BBC is using stan­dard Eng­lish cor­rectly. Under the pro­posed scheme 100 unpaid ‘mon­i­tors’ would note gram­mat­i­cal errors and report back on them to a cen­tral adviser.

The idea makes me cringe.

It stems from the notion that gram­mar is fixed, that it rep­re­sents an immov­able set of rules that must not be bro­ken. Ever.

Gram­mar is, of course, noth­ing of the sort. At best it is a set of guide­lines, a snap­shot of the state of the lan­guage at any given time. Cer­tainly, if you take a wan­der through most mod­ern guides to gram­mar (eg the excel­lent Cam­bridge Gram­mar of Eng­lish) you’ll see a pic­ture of an evolv­ing lan­guage where there are far more rules of thumb than absolutes.

The other thing that gets me about these kinds of schemes is that they tend to for­get that lan­guage is about com­mu­ni­ca­tion. They get so hung up on tick­ing gram­mat­i­cal boxes that they fail to answer the most impor­tant ques­tion: did it get the point across in the clear­est, most com­pelling way? I’ve seen many gram­mat­i­cally per­fect sen­tences span­ning 50 words or more that com­pletely fail to com­mu­ni­cate any sort of idea what­so­ever. Worse than this, they pro­vide the reader with an easy excuse to stop read­ing and never come back. And that is sim­ply a waste of words.

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